Let me preface this by saying this is my pet project and is of no importance whatever. The wife questions my sanity for working several late nights on this, but she's pretty sure I'm insane anyway...

I have an IBM Thinkpad 365 (2E9 i think) and I am trying to get a capable Linux installed on this Pentium 1 powerhouse! I have VL 5.9 Light burned on cd, but this won't boot from the PCMCIA-external cd drive... Here's what I have done so far:

partitioned the 2.1 gig drive with a 1.5gig bootable ext2 hda1, enough ext2 hda2 to hold the .iso file, and 80 megs of swap (hda3(hda5)). I booted using your 3-floppy method and ran vinstall-iso, selecting the minimum more or less. Things went along fine until the config process, when it apparantly ran out of hda1 space. So I removed the hard drive installed it in another machine where I ran gParted to remove the partition holding the .iso file and expanded the first partition so it now has all ext2 hda1 with 80meg swap. Reinstalled hd in the Thinkpad. No dice on reboot - LILO not installed. Booted using 2-disk BasicLinux 3.5 Highly recommended by the way! The hda1 partition is there and looks like a mostly complete VL5.9 Light except for LILO AND the vmlinuz in /boot, some broken links here and there.. Tried again with the LILO on the BasLinux diskette as follows: LILO boot:hd root=/dev/hda1. Kernel Panic! missing vmlinuz! I managed to get the vmlinuz installed (vmlinuz-ide-2.6.22.19) and tried booting using the LILO on the BasLinux diskette again with LILO boot:hd root=/dev/hda1. This time things chugged along until the message about "kernel memory <something> freed then it just hangs. I have the little TPad booted with BasLinux and the VLlight partition mounted so I can edit and copy at will, but I'm not sure what needs to be done. Obviously letting the installation run to completion would probably fix things, but I can't get PCMCIA running with the 3-diskette system, and BasLinux works fine with PCMCIA but chokes on the vinstall script.

What is the boot sequence? Where is it failing? What do I need to edit?

I know enough UNIX/Linux command line to get in serious trouble. I have more trust in my hardware expertise...

Looks like the kernel initially did not get copied from the ISO (/isolinux/kernel/) to hard drive (/boot/). The kernels get renamed in the process, "sata" becomes "vmlinuz-2.6.22.19" and "ide" -> "vmlinuz-ide-2.6.22.19". After that, LILO gets installed.

Basiclinux will not run the installer, it requires a 2.6.x kernel.

I do have a new version of the 3 floppies where I added the option of booting an installed version with it. If you hang on until tomorrow (tonight is blocked off for St. Paddy's Day celebration), I can get you a copy of it.

There is a way to use the floppies you have to boot your installed system. Restart and boot from floppies as you did when you ran the installer. When it gets to the end and gives you the message "If all went well, you can now load Linux and start install." and it tells you to press a key to continue, hit Ctrl-C to terminate the batch file. It should drop you to a c:\ prompt. Now issue command: loadlin.exe linux root=/dev/hda1 ro

nightfllier's suggestion improved things a bit. I was able to boot the /dev/hda1 installation and run the vasm setup.

Two (maybe related) problems now: 1. during boot, a message comes up "FATAL:unable to find <library> modules" It is looking for 2.6.26.5 library, but only the 2.6.22.19 libraries are installed. 2. It still won't start the PCMCIA even though the rc.pcmcia script is run. Thus I have no network or cdrom. Is this related to the library issue?

Could I put the 2.6.22.19 initrd and vmlinuz-ide-2.22.19 on (several) diskettes?Could I use a different boot command line?I also have the bare.i on diskette from slackware 11 along with the rootdisk.img from the VL5.9 diskette. That combination using "mount root=/dev/hda1" initial command line makes the thing hang right after the "freeing unused kernel memory" message.

No idea to either question. I assumed the 2.6.26.5 came from the diskette. To my knowledge it is not on the /dev/hda. It may have come from the VL6.0 standard cd I have. I honestly don't remember where I got the diskette images from...

You need to get either the "sata" kernel off the VL 5.9 ISO, and copy it to the hard drive in /boot, name it "vmlinuz-2.22.19", or use the "ide" one and name it "vmlinuz-ide-2.22.19". Actually, do both, that way you can chose between the two on startup.

Note that I changed initrd. I saw that my initrd was much smaller, so copied initrd.img off the cd and linked it. Don't know if this is a good thing to do, but it had no effect.

LILO install always fails no matter what options are selected, even making floppy boot disks. LILO looks like it never got installed. Not sure why.

Are there other loadlin options to try? I also have the Slackware 11 bare-i plus rootdisk.img (from cd/install/floppy). Using boot: mount root=/dev/hda1 makes the thing hang right after the "freeing kernel memory" message. Are there alternate command lines to try with this?

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH!!! Booted the 3 diskettes using the loadlin linux root=/dev/hda1 ro and got to a root prompt. Ran liloconfig using the defaults. No errors! Rebooted - LILO came up and defaulted to "linux". Hit <enter> and it booted up on 2.6.22.19!!! (lol LILO)

Still had lib module issues (says /lib/modules/2.6.22.19/modules.dep is missing. It isn't, but this is major improvement.Did find and start PCMCIA, but still needs config tweaking...